I'm a Self-Made Woman Who Suffers From Class Anxiety

I independently earn over double the income we lived on as a five-person family. I'm not complaining or bragging—which is partly why I feel weird discussing it—but it just feels disorienting, like I fell asleep in one place and woke up in a completely different one.

As a kid, I didn't know you weren't supposed to talk about money, because it was all we talked about. It was a force in my family, like the weather. My dad was on disability, doing the occasional odd job or shelving boxes at Target, and my mom was a teacher in Trenton, New Jersey. My best friend as a kid was from a wealthy, conservative family; her Ivy League-obsessed mother would vent to my mom about how families like theirs "don't get enough financial aid." Years later I realized that was why my mom didn't like her.

In middle school, I obsessively catalogued class signifiers around me from big to tiny: Aéropostale is poor, American Eagle is middle-class, Abercrombie is upper-middle-class—the kind of class signifiers you'd only pick up on as a sharp-eyed poor kid. For my best friend Julie, with whom I bonded at 19 over our similar socioeconomic background, it was Nutella: "These girls in my high school cafeteria were spreading it on their toast, and I was like, 'What's that?' and they looked at me like I was a swamp creature."

I'm 28 now, and I independently earn over double the income we lived on as a five-person family. I'm not complaining or bragging—which is partly why I feel weird discussing it—but it just feels disorienting, like I fell asleep in one place and woke up in a completely different one. I still study the "right" clothes, makeup, apartment, the nonchalance I should now be able to effortlessly project. No matter how solid my bank account, it seems like there's always some new bar to clear.

"Upwardly-mobile women from blue-collar backgrounds spend a lot of time figuring out how to decorate their house like an upper-middle-class home. The problem was, they didn't grow up in homes like that, so they didn't really know how. But they feared that if they failed at that, people would know they came from a different background."

So this is typical?

"Unfortunately, it's very typical," says Streib. "I spoke to [formerly blue-collar] women in their mid-forties, who have been exposed to the middle class for half their lives, and these things still haunt them."

"This obsession can cause a rift between partners," she added. When these women were with men from middle-class families, "even though [the husbands] intellectually got it, they didn't emotionally get it. To them they never had any issues with being socially rejected because their house looked like a 'poor family's house' so they were a little skeptical that anyone would really judge people that harshly."

Julie grew up one of seven kids in Michigan, where the family lived off her stepfather's salary as a postal worker, which they supplemented with child support checks from Julie's paternal dad. She admits that she resented her ex-boyfriend for the financial support he got from his family.

"It would bother me when [my ex] wanted to split stuff, because he didn't work, and I was like, 'I waitressed for a hundred years for this money, and you're the one who wanted to go to this fucking movie. You pay for it.' Which is wrong and kind of anti-feminist and just problematic, but I really resented that I worked so hard for my fifty bucks or whatever, and his just magically appeared in his account."

But at the same time, says Streib, women from backgrounds like mine and Julie's are drawn to those men in the first place for a very specific reason.

"I've only ever dated dudes who come from really upper class families, the kind of guys who can call their parents and ask for money at any point," Julie says. "I think I'm attracted to their faith in money, their relaxed attitude toward it, their confidence that they'll always have enough."

Unsurprisingly, most people I have met during my adulthood in New York always have enough. As Julie diplomatically puts it, "As a late twenty-something in NYC working in an artistic field, I find that the majority of the people I know can and do rely on their parents for some level of financial support."

The mostly nice, sometimes alienating thing about the city is that nobody really needs to know what your life was like before you came here. This is where you come to reinvent yourself: even Taylor Swift knows that. More than that, friendships here aren't like anywhere else, except maybe LA. (Or, on second thought, any cosmopolitan city.) Here you can be close friends with someone whose apartment you've never even been to.

If you try to talk about your less-than-glamorous childhood, I've found that the friend will do something like reach back three generations and say they're basically in the same boat because their grandpa grew up poor. Or she'll empathize about how her family was similar because they "only made $100,000 a year for four people." And you don't want to be that asshole who's like, 'No, I mean poor-poor,' because then it's just a disenfranchisement contest, and it's just a mess. That impulse to relate comes from a good place, but often ends with you feeling even more alienated.

"People tend to want to immediately throw down their working class bonafides, so I know right away they, too, didn't have a lot of money," says Tracy, an a writer and new mom in L.A. who grew up below the poverty line in a trailer with four siblings. "We all have a very different idea of being poor, but it shuts down the conversation, because then I feel like I am competing if I try to clarify that I am talking about not getting real dental care, aside from one visit, until I was 25 years old.

At the same time, though, back at home: "I'd feel like a real dick talking to some of my working class family members about the fact that I only buy this organic, grass-fed butter now even if it's five bucks."

Julie adds, "My mom worked so hard to take care of me and my siblings as a kid, she sometimes gets really defensive when I talk about money and how it was sort of erratic for us."

I've felt guilty for telling people it was rough growing up, because I'd never be here if my mom hadn't worked so hard. You can't help but feel shitty when you're buying $50 throw pillows and your mom probably can't retire for another 20 years. I've suggested that I could help out, but she's way too proud.

"Nobody realizes that a lot of upwardly mobile people are isolated and uncomfortable."

So eventually you stop talking about—any of it, to either side—even though it's a huge part of you. And while that awkwardness and guilt is gone, you never really feel known, and you're perpetuating your own isolation. "Nobody realizes that a lot of [upwardly mobile] people are isolated and uncomfortable, and that's because nobody talks about it," says Streib.

"I'll always have a kind of status anxiety," admits Tracy. I'm too educated to be working class; I'm too working class to pass as affluent. I don't know where I fit, and I can't find anyone else like me to help me figure it out."

But maybe the weirdest thing about it is that people like Julie and Tracy and I are living examples of the American Dream, a.k.a. that fairytale that's consistently trotted out as an excuse for rich people to be taxed less. "Poor kid works hard, becomes rich adult, therefore 'if all poor people were less lazy,' they could financially succeed, too." This, I believe, is absolutely ludicrous. It's also the last thing I'd want as a takeaway from my experience.

Tracy agrees. "The worst thing you can do is bootstrap out of it and then become a bootstrapper type, where you mistakenly think that because you were able to pull yourself up out of it, everyone should, which simply is not the case."

I asked Streib about this. "It's a huge issue that the discourse on class in this country is based on morals," she says. If you work hard, and you're a moral person and play by the rules, you can get ahead—poverty is framed as a personal fault. This narrative does so much damage to how we're able to talk about class. We need to realize a lot of people work hard and don't get ahead, and a lot of people don't work hard and are still ahead." And yet here I am, stuck in the middle.

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